OSSR: John Wick's Libertarian Fantasy Utopia

[ArmorClassZero]

Wew, lads. Lots to unpack here.

@Grek: If a shopkeeper is price gouging, the solution to that is... competition. If you're selling something people want at a price they begrudgingly pay, and I come in with the same or comparable item with a lower price, then I draw your customers away from you, often with celebrated thanks from them. Then you have no choice but to offer your goods at the same or lower price, depending on what you can afford as a seller. This is so basic and so obvious that even drug dealers intuitively understand they can make more money by undercutting the other dealers. Now, in the case of natural monopolies, no such thing has ever existed, nor is likely to ever exist. There is always a competitor in some form or another. If there is money to be made in an industry, field, or trade, people will find a way, provided the Govt does not restrict them from doing so.

@Whatever: It's called intellectual honesty and internal consistency. If 1st principles are to be maintain, then people must be allowed to do as they wish (in accords with 1st principles.) If you declare that [group] must be free to choose their own destiny, free from the coercion of others, to exclude whoever they wish from their private property for whatever reason they wish, then you must concede that that goes for EVERY group - not just the ones you view as disadvantaged, oppressed, or whatever. The fact that the thinkers of the Austrian School (primarily Jewish) recognized this, and recognized it held true for everybody, whites (relevant to them: Germans) included, would attest to their intellectual honesty and internal consistency.

@Souran: I can see how you may be confused, as to the Statist, segregation means, "Segregation decreed and enforced by the State," when it is perfectly legitimate for two mutually consenting parties to willfully segregate (as I said.) It is also perfectly legitimate for a group to decline to associate with another group, provided they don't use force, violence, coercion to achieve their segregation. And likewise, no group can justifiably use force/violence/coercion to impose themselves on another group. No group can justifiably access another group without the latter's consent. Included in the right to liberty is "freedom of association." No third party can justifiably use coercion, force, violence, etc. on two consenting parties. Just as I would support a group who wished to segregate, I would support any individuals or groups who wished to associate. You may be shocked to learn, that because all of this is true, that Libertarianism thus supports secession too.

@Frank: It only took, what? 5 hours? 6? for Godwin's Law to truly take effect. Also, you never bothered to actually refute anything related to Libertarianism. You went on-and-on about money's role and value in society... instead of addressing anything I actually said.

@Mord: I don't think you've ever read anything about the Libertarian philosophy if that's the case. Everything is based on praxeology: how humans behave in this reality, how humans take rational action based on desires and wants. It's not theoretical. It's not "what ifs". It's observations that when X condition is true, humans generally behave like [this], cited by historical examples. There's so much in your comment that illustrates everything that's wrong with your (and by extension, youse guyses) thinking. You seem to think that the haves and have-nots have always been so, when in reality there is a constant flow in and out of both categories. Fortunes are won, earned, accumulated, lost, squandered, mismanaged, etc. ~99% of and business that have existed within the past 100 years have gone out of business. But I appreciate how bold you are to admit that what you (and these others) are really after is other people's wealth. You will call it "redistribution" but admit what it is: theft. And again, you demonstrate an erroneous thought that tells me you haven't studied Libertarianism or thought things through. If I were a plutocrat, why would I want competition? Why would I want Govt to be limited to just defending property rights, when I could do what so many businesses today are trying to do: lobby for Govt subsides (other people's money), limited liabilities, restrictions on my competition, exclusivity to this or that market? If I was a plutocrat, wouldn't I be in favor of mass immigration? I could get so much labor for dirt cheap! Wouldn't I advocate that Govt make my product a mandatory purchase? Libertarianism doesn't assume a level playing field, on the contrary, as I've said at least twice now in this thread: Life is unfair. Life is hard. No one is born equal. Nature doesn't discriminate, she is not a respecter of persons. Libertarianism recognizes this and works forward from that. You call Libertarianism 'myopic' but as a philosophy, it's about as all encompassing, inclusive, and accurate as any philosophy can be.

@Dean: Your understanding is what is childlike. It is as Bastiat said,

"Can the law — which necessarily requires the use of force — rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I DEFY ANYONE TO EXTEND IT BEYOND THIS PURPOSE WITHOUT PERVERTING IT, AND, CONSEQUENTLY, TURNING MIGHT AGAINST RIGHT. [...] Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers?

It's actually laughable that you conceptualize it as "the magical right to own [thing]". The right exist a priori. There's no magic to it, just a recognition that for anyone to take something that does not belong to them, that is not given to them, puts them in the wrong. Even primitive peoples intuitively understand this concept. Even CHILDREN understand this concept. And you own it even if someone steals it from you - just because they now possess it does not mean ownership changed. Now, in order for justice to be rendered, should you steal my 2010 Chevy, I would probably need collective force i.e. Govt, to reclaim it. And that is the proper sphere of Govt - to ensure justice by secure private property and personal liberty. Also, "how can there be no money or no economy without society"... what? Who said that? Frank didn't say that. I didn't say that. But you're convinced you're right without understanding what you're trying, and failing, to argue against.

@DeadDMWalking: Yes, quote Kaelik, another lemming who doesn't know what it is he's talking about. Where does this full-rebellion 24/7 you mention come from? Why are you talking about late-night basketball and crime? Social spending saves money? Whose? Oh, wait, we see the Leftist/Liberal/Progressive thought summed up succinctly:

Likewise, requiring employers to pay living wages to the employed saves taxpayer money.

That's hilarious. Imagine believing that the Govt is saving you money after they pick your pocket and then demand your employer pay you more to compensate. No, the difference between you Statists and myself (us Libertarians) is that I recognize that I -as an individual- have a moral (personal) duty. You and your lot put that duty off, that responsibility off, onto a bureaucratic institution which demands your charity at the end of a gun: the Govt. Here, have a meme:

[DSMatticus]

Did I miss a crazy thread? I feel like I missed a crazy thread. Everyone already got to say all the good bits and we've already learned the guy's so far up his own asshole he's defending private sector segregation.

Libertarianism is a fascinatingly stupid thing. Once upon a time, someone observed that in the world of spherical cows and perfectly omniscient long-run rational actors where start-up/ramp-up costs and times are always zero, absolutely no intervention is necessary to achieve perfectly efficient economic transactions, where a perfectly efficient economic transaction is defined as one in which the price of a good is equal to its cost of production. That same someone observed that the world in which he lived in was not actually one of spherical cows and perfectly omniscient long-run rational actors where start-up/ramp-upcosts and times are always zero so for the love of god don't be such a fucking dumbass.

"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."

That sounds rather like Adam Smith spending a bajillion words to say what Kim Stanley Robinson said in a dozen, as was the fashion at the time. That sounds rather like Adam Smith describing the horrors of unionbusting and economic conspiracy against the public good by plutocrats, because it is. I also particularly like his observation that workers hold less bargaining power than their masters, hinted above ("present subsistence") and said explicitly elsewhere:

"A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate."

I cannot say I see eye to eye with Adam Smith on how best to structure a society, really, but if I could snap my fingers and trade today's libertarians for early capitalists, that is an easy choice to make. Adam Smith knew and accurately described the dangers of capitalism even as he advocated it, and understood that avoiding those dangers would require public intervention, but because he lived in an era where democracy was an untested thing and state, church, and industry alike conspired to enslave the public at every turn, capitalism was the tool by which he imagined we might break some of those chains - or at least trade them for less burdensome ones.

You embrace a twisted version of his philosophy manufactured by plutocrats hundreds of years after the fact for the explicit of purpose of restoring the chains he thought his ideas might break. You are a fool and a disgrace and I think if there is one thing Adam Smith and I could agree on it is that you are not worth the gruel your masters would feed you in the world you are helping them build.

Capitalist literature is much like the bible - the loudest fans know the least, and the 'true believers' are being fed a version which has been disingenuously sanitized to further some political goal which is at best tangential to the original and at worst actively insulting.

[Mord]

No, the difference between you Statists and myself (us Libertarians) is that I recognize that I -as an individual- have a moral (personal) duty.

[ArmorClassZero]

@DSMatticus: And you're a dumb c?nt who doesn't realize, like the rest of these Statists, that your ceding more and more of your earnings and your savings, to an institution that purports to be for the public good, but is factually destroying any hope your descendants will have for the quality of life you experienced as a child. You think Libertarian ideas are "restoring chains" and that I'm helping build a world for plutocrats? Take a look in the mirror you moron. It's Statists like you who are supporting rising taxes, inflation, more welfare, more govt intervention, more govt expansion, more govt duties all under the feel-good guise of your misconceived philanthropy. And who is it that thinks like you do? The politicians in Washington - the agents and servants of plutocrats, and plutocrats themselves. Not one advocates for Libertarian principles, but just about all of them are appealing to the people to increase Govt reach with promises of free this and free that. And just about all of them capitulate to their donors and their mercantile constituents (the plutocrats) and obey the pressures of the plutocrats' lobbyists: granting them special privileges, subsidies, limited liabilities, mass immigration (low-skill manual labor), land grants, etc. These plutocrats spend billions playing political games with each other, because you and your lot have given them the power to do so, because you and your lot expect that the Govt has a role beyond it's proper purpose.

It's even in the passage you quoted: "and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen." What does that sound like? You name it, but you don't seem to grasp it. He's talking about appeals to the Govt power. Those plutocrats, like these today, wield the Govt as a tool. But you and your lot are foolish enough think you can wield it in turn to defend yourselves. It won't happen. You're so concerned about big business, but you never stop to think: "what gives big business its power?" It isn't money. It's Govt being thought of as a tool for anything other than self-defense of personal liberty and private property.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious. To know this, it is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue is to know the answer.

[ArmorClassZero]

@Mord: You jest, but am I wrong? Do you not expect the Govt to take up this duty of helping the poor, the sick, the elderly?

"Of course, I would do it myself," you say, "but I haven't the time or the money."

Yes, I imagine that when the Govt takes 1/5 of your paycheck every week that that would indeed be the case.

[Whatever]

@Whatever: It's called intellectual honesty and internal consistency.

This joke is actually too easy, so I'll refrain. I have some standards.

If 1st principles are to be maintained

Your 1st principles are garbage, but there's no point in engaging with them.

It's very clear that, surely by purest coincidence, you happen to have settled upon a set of very fine principles which guide--nay, compel--you to support the segregation and exclusion of non-white people. That terrible burden falls squarely on your shoulders, because you have seen the world more clearly than we.

Pointing out the many basic failings in your world view continues to have no impact, because your world view is shaped by the conclusions you wish to reach. Your world view is a dumpster fire because you're trying to justify Whites-only lunch counters, Sundown Towns, and white nationalism.

Again, fuck off.

[DSMatticus]

I do not understand why you have chosen to die on the hill that is healthcare.

It is very clear how effective private sector healthcare is at treating the poor, the sick, and the elderly - not very much at all. The poor cannot afford private sector health insurance, until the regulation of pre-existing conditions the sick were kicked off of it the moment they became sick, and before medicare the elderly were forced out of it by increasing expenses their fixed (or zero) incomes could not cover. And of course social security is the direct result of a government program and the now basically over era of pensions was a result of deliberately crafted government tax incentives and the lawful protection of union activities from retribution that empowered them to negotiate for all kinds of awesome things in spite of Adam Smith's oh-so-keen observation that the master's need for the worker is not so immediate as the worker's need for the master. Retirement basically did not exist before that period and people worked until they were too infirm to continue working and then died destitute when their need for medical care burnt through their piddling savings. These problems all existed contemporaneously with private charity and private charity did nothing to eliminate them.

Your theory that charity is sufficient to correct the economic realities of private health care is an already tested theory that failed. You "believe" in it because... you have to. You need a solution to the problem that is your philosophy would kill your fucking grandparents that isn't "let them die," so you have to pretend that that thing we were doing before will magically work this time because reasons.

And trying to levy that as a personal slight against individuals for not being charitable enough is very bizarre. You also haven't given enough to charity to single-handedly solve the world's many problems. Bill Gates has been forced to pay more in taxes than you ever will, has given more to charity than you ever will, and also hasn't single-handedly solve the world's many problems. If I remember correctly, at least one person in this thread has provided emergency health care services in an impoverished third world country as part of some charitable initiative - I may be misremembering/mischaracterizing that, I was never clear on the details. I imagine both the ethical and economic value of that is more than anything you've ever done in the name of charity, and... it also failed to completely eliminate preventable deaths in third world nations.

The notion of individual solutions for institutional problems is "stop hitting yourself" levels of dumb. "Yes, I advocate for a system that proliferates the kinds of poverty you describe, but hey, if you don't like it so much just FIX it OUR gRAndParENTs cAnT StarVE iF we JusT FEEd Them What aRe yOU CHEap DOnt YoU LOVE yOuR grAndmA? ... Alternatively, we could build a world in which our and our grandparents' contributions to society are used in part to create a body of social safety nets and regulations that protect them once they are infirm, and then we don't have to pretend that "poor people aren't giving enough to charity for their grandparents to deserve to live" is a legitimate discussion.

As an aside, I understand that you find those quotes and memes very compelling, but the only reason you find them compelling is because you have already been baptized in the koolaid. Every single one of them is an emotional appeal to your sense of indignation at government intervention, a sense of indignation you have because you already believe that government intervention is inherently bad, but not one of them makes an argument to the effect that government intervention is more harmful than the alternative, and so they do fuck-all to persuade people who aren't you. E.g. "who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers?"

If 'our brother' is shitting into the groundwater from which our community's wells all draw, I enthusiastically believe we should use the force that has been given to us to punch him in the face so that he stops and we do not all die from cholera.

If 'our brother' is running a factory that produces a fuckton of smog and selling the goods produced by that factory to another country that will literally never see that smog, I enthusiastically believe we should use the force that has been given to us to punch him in the face so that we do not die of lung cancer. Or, at the very least, have a very public discussion about whether or not we should punch him in the face or set standards on the amount of pollutants he is allowed to generate or demand compensation for his individual consumption of a shared resource (clean air) and so forth and so on.

And now I think we are actually out of things to say. You're not a very interesting punching bag. You really love beating your dick to those empty, rhetorical quotes and pretending you have some kind of moral highground because you... want old people to beg society for medicine (and pretend they'll get it when they actually won't) instead of have society promise it to them, but... none of that shit is compelling to us.

Also the "fuck yeah segregation, if black people don't like it all they need to do is accumulate enough economic influence - despite having been brought here as slaves and kept in poverty by an organized effort to exclude them from society - to demand change" is a bit of a deal breaker on the "you are a human being worth talking to and not a white nationalist shitgolem" front. I got to do my shpiel about how modern libertarianism is a disgrace to the actual founders of capitalist thought, and I think that's the only interesting thing about the "How is libertarianism shit? Let me count the ways..." discussion that hadn't been said yet. All this other shit is just beating a dead horse. A dead, stupid, racist horse.

[ETortoise]

AC0, you’ve made a lot of claims in this thread that people don’t understand “real” libertarianism. I would posit that most people here understand it better than you do; in that they understand it as a political tool used by the very powerful to convince the slightly-more-powerful-than-average to support the status quo. The largest financial backers of libertarian thought in the USA are (or were) the Koch brothers, who would count as plutocrats by any reasonable measure.

I’m going to skip the derisive dunking, since others on TGD are so much better at it. Instead, I’d like to contend two of your premises; private property and natural rights.

Private Property, that is the exclusionary use of property or capital to create wealth for the owner in no way belongs to it’s nominal owner separate from their place in society. You mentioned above how people-le are entitled to the wealth they or their ancestors created, but no wealth is created in a vacuum. Let’s take the most primal form of private property, land, as an example. Land that is untouched by human hands has limited use unless there are valuable resources on or under it. Most land is valuable because of its location in relation to infrastructure and other desirable man-made features (cool bars, good schools,) its ability to be used for agriculture, or the buildings that are already on it. In each case, the land’s value is tied up in the labor of other people; many of whom were not compensated for their work at all, let alone fairly. If someone steals your truck and I buy it off them, am I the owner of your truck?

Example #1: In England before the rise of capitalism, most land was de facto common property. The peasants were obligated to pay rent to the landlord, but had certain rights and privileges of use of grazing land, wood, and ‘wasteland.’ Starting in the 17th century, the Gentry began to convert the land into pasture for the wool trade. Farmers whose ancestors drained swamps and felled forests to create useful land were dispossessed. Though generations had lived under a system where the people who actually worked the land had rights and privileges in regards to it, the government at the time supported the Gentry in excluding them through the passage of new laws and the application of state violence.

Example #2: Many countries are settler-colonies where a group of people came and dispossessed the previous inhabitants through violence and disease. The argument used most often by these people was that their previous inhabitants were not truly using and cultivating the land. This was of course, bullshit. In the Americas, Aztec and Inca civilizations were obviously complex, and the various North American nations made use of agriculture and modified the land to varying degrees. Now, in the US at least, their descendants are disproportionate victims of poverty and violent crime.

In both cases were have people who’s traditional rights of use over land was taken from them by the state. Why should the property rights of those the state gifted their land to be sacrosanct now? Separate from thorny questions of feudal-capitalist transformations and simple truth is that very little is worth anything separate from it’s relationship to other people. Industrial and technological production rests on the inventions of numerous people and the complex web of infrastructure and demand that creates a need for a product and the ability. Agricultural requires the use of strains of plants and animals that were bred by countless humans over thousands of years. The fact a person can look at their business concern and say “I made that,” even discounting the fact that their employees did the actual labor, only shows the facile thinking of most so-called entrepreneurs.

Now let’s take a look at “Natural Rights.” In quotes because there’s nothing natural about them. I think this is one of the things an earlier poster was getting at when they said libertarianism requires a faith in the supernatural or religion. The simple truth is that, if there isn’t a god who is interested in humanity, no rights are “natural.” Therefore the term “natural rights” simply means “rights that I think are so much more important than other, opposing rights that I will try to convince you they aren’t even up for debate.” But, as Frank said earlier, all rights are also an infringement on rights. Your right to free speech necessarily infringes on my right to not hear opinions I disagree with, and so on.

Going deeper, looking at the right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” let’s drill down on the Right to Life. In the libertarian paradigm, you have a right to life that excludes a right to food, water, shelter and healthcare. (Incidentally, this is why Frank quoted Anatole France* earlier.) So now we see the libertarian Right to Life only protects you from bodily harm. But wait, Life also includes your private property! That’s great, so you can... use violence to protect your property? Does that mean that the Right to Life not only doesn’t include a right to food, but also means that you can be harmed for stealing food to survive? Sorry Jean Valjean, but we’re talking about Natural Rights here!

The real fact is that most libertarians don’t really believe in even the natural right to property. I mean, if they did the United States of America would have committed two of the greatest crimes against that right. The dispossession of US lands without sufficient compensation from Native Americans as described above, and the vast amount of unpaid labor coerced from enslaved Africans should be as monstrous to Libertarians as they are to Leftists. Since the US is still extant, shouldn’t the land and wealth taken from these peoples’ ancestors be returned to them?

In fact, the libertarian position seems to be that reparations for slavery are sound, but can’t happen because everything must happen at the level of the individual and the claim that a particular person benefitted from slavery is one that is “incredibly difficult to prove.” (https://mises.org/wire/reparations-vs-property-rights) Convenient, no? In fact, the article says that a descendant of a slave would have to prove their ancestors were harmed by the ancestors of the person they were suing; which doesn’t make sense. Going back to the stolen truck example, it would mean that you could only get reparations from the person who stole your truck and couldn’t claim the truck if it was bought from the thief by a third party.

So-called Natural Rights are framed in such a way that they protect the powerful from the powerless more than the reverse. (Hello again, Anatole France.) Life includes your property, but not a right to the things needed to sustain life. Liberty can be infringed if you violate someone else’s property while trying to get the things you need to live. The Pursuit of Happiness is completely limited by one’s means.

In the end, I’d like re-examine your claim that “life is hard.” The simple fact is that it doesn’t need to be. We, being the people of Earth, have enough resources and production to provide for everyone’s needs. We don’t for many reasons, including that the current system makes some people very rich. The fact that you can flippantly dismiss the fact that the system you propose would consign even more people to death and penury than our current one is obviously cruel and evil. That’s why it has to be ethically laundered through esoteric appeals to “Natural Rights.”

*Incidentally, your dismissal of writers like France for being liberal/leftist/progressives is intellectually lazy as hell. Obviously people writing critiques of libertarianism are probably going to be ideologically opposed to libertarianism. Obviously.

If you’d like to actually know what some of your ideological opponents believe and are arguing, I recommend reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... t-of-bread Bonus, he’s an anarchist, not a statist! (I am not an anarchist, but chapter 1 Our Riches is a great rundown on the leftist conception of property rights.)

[jt]

I do have one good thing to say about libertarianism: It is probably the simplest theory of government. You can start with just property rights and with only a little bit of tortured logic you can bootstrap that into some semblance of most other rights. That's pretty neat.

@Dean: Your understanding is what is childlike. [...] Even CHILDREN understand this concept.

Teehee.

But, in good faith: the idea that everyone in a society understands a concept doesn't mean that it's an inherent thing that exists in and of its own accord, any more than Saturdays exist of their own accord. And yes, children understand Saturdays. People pick up the assumptions of the culture they're embedded in, that's just how people work. You should notice where those assumptions come from though, and examine them, instead of building entire political frameworks around something you've always taken for granted and never actually thought about.

Ownership comes from the government's recognition of that ownership. If I break into somebody's house, change the locks, and replace all the pictures of their family with pictures of my family, that does not become my house. The municipal government has a piece of paper in a filing cabinet somewhere that says that the house belongs to the original owners, and when they go talk to the government and get that piece of paper, the government will send armed men to kick me out. This is inherently a government function.

There are limits on what a person is allowed to own. You can own land, buildings, portions of buildings. You can own businesses. You can own simple objects that you use in your day to day life. You can own certain ideas via patents and copyright. You can't own the abstract concept of beauty. You can't own the right to breathe air. You can't own people.

Who decides what things someone is allowed to own?

This is one of the most important questions of government. It should be the central question of a political philosophy that tries to base itself on ownership laws. But libertarianism does not ask this question, does not answer this question, and is not equipped to handle this question. That's why everyone thinks it's such a foolish ideology.

[Grek]

Now, in the case of natural monopolies, no such thing has ever existed, nor is likely to ever exist.

The water example was not made up.

You've just survived a hurricane. There power's out, water lines pour brown and you're getting really thirsty. Now, as a Libertarian, you would naturally never stoop so low as to steal water. But the only person who has clean water left wants 100$ per bottle. What do you do?

[ArmorClassZero]

@Grek: Rest assured that there are 1000s of competitors inbound to your location laden with water-cases who are itching to undercut that guy. Congrats, dude had a "natural monopoly" for a day.

@ETortoise:

The simple fact is that it [life] doesn’t need to be [hard]. We, being the people of Earth, have enough resources and production to provide for everyone’s needs. We don’t for many reasons, including that the current system makes some people very rich.

"We think that individuals are inherently prone to corruption and selfishness. Therefore, free markets fail, capitalism fails, etc. We also think that a Govt composed of such individuals such as we, who are incorruptible and unselfish, would solve all of our problems, provided they were given enough power."

This is you and your lot. Bastiat predicts your Socialist response and calls it out:

The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority. They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep.

@JT: Who decides what things someone is allowed to own?

It is assumed a priori that if you acquired it through mutual consent of the previous owner, or crafted it with your own too hands, it is yours. Children understand this concept. But the thing about children is... it often takes some degree of education and proper rearing to curb the natural inclination to want to take what is not yours. They recognize themselves in the mirror early on, but recognizing the person-hood of others comes later.

[Grek]

@Grek: Rest assured that there are 1000s of competitors inbound to your location laden with water-cases who are itching to undercut that guy. Congrats, dude had a "natural monopoly" for a day.

Empirically, no. There are not. Price gouging during natural disasters is a problem even with laws preventing it. Market forces don't solve this problem and claiming that they do just shows that you're wildly out of touch with reality. The 'flippant answers' thing is no joke.

[Username17]

I'm a doctor, I deal with a lot of cancer patients. One of the things we do every week is have multidisciplinary team meetings. Those meetings have representation from Radiology, Pathology, Surgery, Oncology, and the Specialist Nurse Service. That is to say that diagnosing and proposing treatment plans for cancer is so complicated that we don't expect one person to be able to do it all. We have five different department heads weighing pros and cons and offering their insights. And even then the recommendations frequently change as new results and responses to treatment and such come in. The same patient will be discussed at MDT multiple times, because things change and some of the results you can't actually get until you've done surgery and sent the samples for microscopic examination and genetic testing and shit.

The whole of humanity is like a human. There are a lot of cells, they form distinct structures, they influence others close by and also influence others far away. They depend on each other to survive and thrive but also use common resources that are in finite supply.

Anyone who tells you they have one weird trick to solve all of humanity's problems is exactly like the snake oil panacea frauds of the 19th century. There isn't a simple set of axioms by which you could logically deduce the solutions to all possible ailments of the human body, and that similarly and obviously isn't possible to solve all the ailments of humanity as a whole.

Each problem in our society is complex because it involves many people and every person is themselves complex. Very few of them have simple answers, and none of those answers are derivable from first principles. You know you have an adequate solution only when you have empirical results that show your solution actually works in the real world - not just when you have good reason to think your proposal would work were it to be employed.

And it's very instructive that when we do have empirical evidence of simple plans that actually work, Libertarians flip the table over and whine. Gun control reduces violence and death. Civil Rights Legislation improves the equality of our society. Banning tetra-ethyl lead improves our health and environment. Libertarians don't support any of these things, even though the evidence for their effectiveness is overwhelming and undeniable.

Most social policy evidence is complex and murky and subject to a lot of confounding factors. But even when the evidence is clear and inarguable, Libertarians still refuse to accept it. Because Libertarianism is an anti-scientific religious cult that supports human suffering.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

There's a couple of examples of libertarian I'd like to bring up.

Firstly, Minerva, an artificial island made by dumping stuff onto a reef in the Pacific to bring it above sea level so libertarians could have their own country there. Everyone from Australia to Japan protested at this, and the King of Tonga took his personal yacht out with some soldiers and claimed it as part of his kingdom to prevent this happening.

This doesn't have too much to do with the ethics of libertarianism, but a group of evil-doers raising an island from the sea floor so they could practice their wickedness, and the king of a nearby country and a small band of soldiers sailing off to put a stop to it sounds pretty cool.

Secondly, the Industrial Revolution, where you had massive amounts of workers with little legal protection having to take whatever jobs they could get, often under truly horrific conditions. The free market didn't stop phossy jaw, lung rot, or kids getting crushed in machinery. It took government regulation of the kind libertarianism opposes to improve things.

The last time we tried something like libertarianism, it inspired the famous works of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.

[ETortoise]

ArmorClassZero,

Well, so much for effort posting. Way to skip past the meat of my post and jump straight to the appeal to decency at the end. (Incidentally, “people are inherently selfish, so we shouldn’t try to govern them much at all” is also stupid. That’s a strawman, but so is Bastiat’s characterization of socialism.)

You, of course, ignore the actual arguments in my post because Libertarianism has to assume it’s priors without arguing for them. That’s what people have been arguing when they say Libertarianism is a facile and infantile political ideology. The whole edifice sits upon everyone agreeing that property rights are good and natural, and therefore should be the most important rights. But everyone doesn’t agree, especially when you get into such “difficult” questions as whether or not it’s morally acceptable to steal bread for your starving family. (The answer is yes.)

It is assumed a priori that if you acquired it through mutual consent of the previous owner, or crafted it with your own too hands, it is yours

This means that all land ownership in the US is illegitimate! Do you believe that? If not, why not?

Here’s some tortured logic from libertarians (including Rothbard) about why land shouldn’t be given back to Native Americans, even though it is morally justified under libertarian theory. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/0 ... _righ.html As we see, in the end libertarianism is used to justify current structures of power and wealth. It simply uses a different set of arguments from conservatism so that it can get a different sort of person to support those structures of power.

You are a useful idiot for the oligarchs and would-be oligarchs. Emphasis in the idiot, because you refuse to actually engage with anyone else’s points in this thread at any level beyond the superficial. In fact, I think Proudhon’s characterization of your friend Bastiat applies equally well to you.

‘Your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never been awake. You are a man for whom logic does not exist. You do not hear anything, you do not understand anything. You are without philosophy, without science, without humanity. Your ability to reason, like your ability to pay attention and make comparisons is zero. Scientifically, Mr. Bastiat, you are a dead man"

[deaddmwalking]

@Grek: Rest assured that there are 1000s of competitors inbound to your location laden with water-cases who are itching to undercut that guy. Congrats, dude had a "natural monopoly" for a day.

I think you also fail to understand an oligarchy, or reasons to collude to maintain profits.

When a hurricane happens, there are not usually thousands of people who have prepared in advance to profit from the disaster. You would have had to have been lucky to be far enough away to have been spared; you must have been lucky to be close enough that you could reasonably travel the distance to profit with sufficient quantity of your good; you must have stockpiled your good in advance. Even if thousands of people were in that exact same situation, demand exceeds supply. When I arrive, I can sell all of my bottles of water for $100, too. Why would I sell them for $80 knowing that once I finished selling them my 'competitor' would now have a monopoly and could continue selling at $100 - or maybe even $120?

If my desire is to maximize profits, I have no incentive to compete on price. In fact, I have every reason to create a partnership where we can work together; I bring in additional supplies while he continues to sell them. If we're really smart, we'll have the area closed to 'non-authorized people' which means anyone that wants to charitably bring in supplies so we can maintain our monopoly for as long as possible.

And this isn't a far-fetched example.

Here's my deal - I have NEVER driven through North Dakota. That said, there are times when I might want to. The important thing to me is that there is a road and it is maintained to the point that when I want to drive through North Dakota, I can. Now, individually, the fact that I want a road to cross North Dakota doesn't mean that I want it enough to pay for it entirely out of my own pocket. In truth, I could not[/b]. If I tried to, I wouldn't have a car, or a house, or health care, so I'd probably be dead so it would be a moot point. Even though I have never used the road, I actually do benefit from having it there in the event that I want to use it. This is the definition of a common good. Not only do some people benefit from it regularly (the small number of people who live in North Dakota), the huge number that MIGHT want to use it, as well as the potential for all kinds of freight deliveries I don't even KNOW are using those roads. Paying some form of tax, even knowing that it is redistributive benefits me by creating this road.

Libertarians want to be free to launch businesses and they require the benefit of roads, rails, and other transportation infrastructure at the very least. They like to pretend that because it has already been built that it should simply be turned over to private enterprise and the people who actually use it will happily pay for it. That turns out not to be true. Private enterprise WON'T maintain roads through North Dakota - we would end up losing out on the economic benefits that exist there. Perhaps you think that we should abandon Alaska and North Dakota and other rural outposts of civilization, but that's a really weird economic argument to make. Surrendering Alaska's $50 Billion in economic output because no one would voluntarily pay to maintain the transportation connections seems weird. There are a lot of places that have been opened up to economic exploitation not by the activity of a visionary individual (who necessarily already had a vast fortune) but instead by the government who let individuals without an established fortune generate a profit for themselves and live the Libertarian dream. It's just dishonesty to pretend that that dream ever gets started without government assistance. That's the great lie you know - that you can lift yourself by your bootstraps.

To pull yourself up by your bootstraps is actually physically impossible. In fact, the original meaning of the phrase was more along the lines of “to try to do something completely absurd.”

Unless you can levitate, you can't lift yourself by your bootstraps. Libertarianism is a laughable defense of something that is impossible by the laws of physics, even if you toss out all economic theories besides wishful thinking.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

There was no other way this thread could have gone, is there?

[hyzmarca]

@Dean: Your understanding is what is childlike. It is as Bastiat said,

"Can the law — which necessarily requires the use of force — rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I DEFY ANYONE TO EXTEND IT BEYOND THIS PURPOSE WITHOUT PERVERTING IT, AND, CONSEQUENTLY, TURNING MIGHT AGAINST RIGHT. [...] Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers?

It's actually laughable that you conceptualize it as "the magical right to own [thing]". The right exist a priori. There's no magic to it, just a recognition that for anyone to take something that does not belong to them, that is not given to them, puts them in the wrong. Even primitive peoples intuitively understand this concept. Even CHILDREN understand this concept. And you own it even if someone steals it from you - just because they now possess it does not mean ownership changed. Now, in order for justice to be rendered, should you steal my 2010 Chevy, I would probably need collective force i.e. Govt, to reclaim it. And that is the proper sphere of Govt - to ensure justice by secure private property and personal liberty. Also, "how can there be no money or no economy without society"... what? Who said that? Frank didn't say that. I didn't say that. But you're convinced you're right without understanding what you're trying, and failing, to argue against.

When I take the fruit from the tree, it is not freely given. When I take the meat from the deer, it fights me screaming. And yet, am I to starve? We steal life to extend our own. This is the nature of life. To live is to kill. A plant might be able to dine on the rays of the sun, but men are not plants.

Any morality that says theft and murder are a priori wrong says that living is a priori wrong.

Those who talk of natural law, who try to use nature to justify their moral systems, fail to tear everything down to the most basic truth. Instead they stop at their own prejudices and call it nature. True nature only has one law. Eat.

Every animal fulfills this law in its own way. Some with claws. Some with teeth. Some patiently. Some swiftly. Some alone. Some with family. Some in great numbers.

Our claws are dull, our teeth are small, we're not particularly fast, and we don't like to wait. So we adopted the ways of the wolf, hunting in packs. And later, of the ant and the bee.

Society is a tool, a means to sustain and propagate ourselves, nothing more. It's a technology we developed in service to the one law. And with that technology, we can eat anything that lives.


Like any technology, society has been developed and refined over the ages. As we've grown better at it, we seem to have forgotten its true purpose. Eating. Also fucking. But mostly eating. In place of that simple truth we have crafted silly fictions abut ideals and natural rights.



Morality is an emergent property of empathy. Empathy is an emotional tool we evolved because it helps us cooperate, and also gives a competitive edge in fucking. And ultimately traits only evolve if they help you accomplish more fucking.

Moral instincts are often accused of being arbitrary. They are not. But they also aren't ordained by god or nature. They are ordained by the P and the D.

And we must recognize that what gets you laid in 1 million BC Sub Saharan Africa might not get you laid in 2019 America.

And this is where we need to go Frederich Nietzsche and recognize that our morality is outdated technology, not unlike a Nokia 3310. Robust, but it won't get you 4G. And so it's up to us to address the outdated aspects of our morality and adapt it to the modern era.

So what gets us pussy and dick and food in the modern era? That's the question we have to ask ourselves when developing our new moral system. And it's not as facile a question as you might think. And the answer isn't as callous as you might think. Turns out, compassion can net a lot of pussy. Turns out that actually listening to people and caring about their problems can get you a lot of poontang or love sausage, as you prefer.

So we put compassion on our list of virtues.

So if we were designing a system of government based on these modern virtues, we might prioritize compassion. Compassion is a good argument for social liberty. Let gay people get married. Let transgender people choose where to poop. It's less of a good argument for economic liberty. Certainly, there are restrictive economic policies that the compassionate would abhor, policies that would do immense harm, that's an infinite field. I can always find an infinite number of policies that would do immense harm, in any situation. But a hands off policy is still a policy, and is one that will allow harm to happen. If we set policy out of compassion, then our goal is to minimize and distribute injury, so that harm is mitigated and spread out.

[Libertad]

Something tells me I should review Hoard the Spoils next...

[Chamomile]

There was no other way this thread could have gone, is there?

Eh. AC0 could have not shown up for it at all. It's not like he's a common poster or anything, so it wasn't a given from the start that he'd start an argument over it. The whole discussion of Libertarianism could've just been left at a handful of posts criticizing its depiction in the book being OSSR'd.

[ArmorClassZero]

@Grek: Rest assured that there are 1000s of competitors inbound to your location laden with water-cases who are itching to undercut that guy. Congrats, dude had a "natural monopoly" for a day.

Empirically, no. There are not. Price gouging during natural disasters is a problem even with laws preventing it. Market forces don't solve this problem and claiming that they do just shows that you're wildly out of touch with reality. The 'flippant answers' thing is no joke.

My answer was not flippant. Let's examine this. You say that, empirically, there are not 1000s of potential vendors and sellers itching to provide water to a disaster area which has a very high demand for water (low supply). You assume "price gouging" is a problem, rather than the market signal of "low supply, high demand" which is basic econ 101 - that "high demand" indicates people willing to pay higher prices. Then you say, "even with laws preventing it," which is curious, as that would support the reason 1000s of would-be vendors and sellers are NOT trying to meet the needs, wants, demands of consumers - they have no incentive to do so besides mercy, charity, compassion, and the like, AND trying to make a buck from the situation could come with serious legal ramifications. *BIG THINK* But now, you are working under the assumption that to try to make a profit off of this misfortune is cruel, evil. But what about the effects of things that are not apparent at 1st glance? Is it better to have a store operate under 1st-come, 1st-served principle with artificially low prices? Is it better that an individual can scoop up massive quantities of water at artificially low prices, and thus denying after-comers the ability to stock up? What about people who need it more - and presumably, are willing to pay to have it? Someone who has a limited budget would have to buy according to his budget if market prices were allowed to rise and fall accordingly, but with artificially low prices, he can buy indiscriminately. Letting market forces operate without Govt constraint would be better for everyone: as supply dwindles, and prices go up, stores are urgently trying to restock, to capitalize(!) on the increased demand (higher prices.) At the same time, suppliers hear the stores clamoring for more stock, and so rush to meet that demand. As more and more vendors, sellers, and suppliers congregate to the disaster area, supply increases, and prices drop. This is the market at work.

@DeadDMWalking: There don't need to be 1000s of people prepared in advanced; you don't need goods stockpiled in advance. All you need is a producer from whom you can buy the product, and a willing consumer, in this instance, stores out-of-state (generally) and the survivors of said hurricane. You are the middle-man in this scenario. You ask, why sell for less, since, once I do and run out of my stock, my competitor would now have a monopoly and continue selling at whatever price he demanded? Well, consider things from the consumers perspective. If I told you I would be back in 6 hours with more stock, would you be willing to wait? Maybe if you couldn't you would give the other seller the $100+ he was asking for. But that's the power of a consumer and the free market: no one can take your money unless you give it to them. And as Frank so ardently pointed out: money in and of itself is worthless, it only has the value we give it. So what's the value of a bottle of water in your scenario? Is it worth $100? What about $80 + a 6 hour wait? What about 20$ and a 10 hour wait? Etc. You as the consumer make that call. Now, your next misstep is saying that in order to maximize profits you have no reason to compete on price, and you assume it would be better to form a partnership. But here's the glaringly obvious problem with that partnership: you aren't getting all the profit. If you were a 1-man operation, all the risk and all the reward would be yours. But if you enter into a partnership, you're sharing the risk and sharing the reward. But that's your call to make as an enterprising entrepreneur. Furthermore, are you assuming your the only one with this idea? Is it just you and this one guy, or did everyone and their brother see the opportunity to make some profit, and so venture down to Florida, only to find they have a lot of competition? You would have competition, unless someone restricted others competing by imposing fines, threats of imprisonment, etc. Use the term oligarchy, but that term isn't what you're describing unless you and your fellow oligarch(s) have the force-of-arms (either personally or in your service) to command a particular territory - in which case, you've become the State. Congratulations, a tyrant is you!

And you make the classical argument of roads and taxes. What evidence is there to suggest that private enterprise won't build and maintain the roads? It would seem that businesses have an incentive to provide easy access via roads, rails, etc. to their establishments, both for customers and general logistics purposes. Now, would it be better for a Govt to come, pick your pocket (tax you), and then seek bidders to do the construction and maintenance necessary? Or would it be better to cut out this thief, and let the businessmen of their own accord, pool their resources to seek bidders to do the construction/maintenance, and reach their mutual end goal? The problem with asking/seeking/giving the Govt a responsibility beyond securing personal and private property rights, is that every additional responsibility they assume gives them an unfair advantage in the market. How can businesses compete with those who get their money via strong-arming? If a business goes over budget, they go out of business. If the Govt goes over budget, they decide they need a bigger budget (and thus steal more.) And consider that every product or service the Govt offers, which is assumed by those here and elsewhere that the free-market is incapable of providing because it is too costly, is then assumed by those same people to be cheaper despite the necessary bureaucracy needed to support it.

[MGuy]

What evidence is there to suggest that private enterprise won't build and maintain the roads? It would seem that businesses have an incentive to provide easy access via roads, rails, etc. to their establishments, both for customers and general logistics purposes.

There are people who live out in the boonies that companies would not perform mail service to because it is not profitable enough to do so. Copy paste this for every service people who live in harder to reach places that won't net a positive return to a business for interacting with. It happens all the time. Not even just for profit driven reasons. It happened historically with Blacks not being welcomed in certain establishments even though their money would've been just as good as any whites. AC0 does not live in the same reality we do.

[Username17]

My answer was not flippant. Let's examine this. You say that, empirically, there are not 1000s of potential vendors and sellers itching to provide water to a disaster area which has a very high demand for water (low supply).

You've already lost the plot. The issue of price gouging during natural disasters isn't "low supply" it's "few suppliers." And the demand for things like water hasn't gone up, it's actually gone down because people accept taking less showers and not washing their cars when everything has been knocked over by a hurricane.

We aren't positing an absolute shortage of water in which some people are going to die of thirst and we use ability to pay as some sort of horrendous selection mechanism to decide who lives and who dies. We're suggesting that there is in fact enough water to meet demand but because it starts in the hands of a small number of people and the need for water is inelastic in time that the people who have the water right now have a coercive ability to extract unfair prices from the people around them at the moment.

The fact that you will die of thirst in three days means that if there isn't (or simply may not be) a competitive source of water in three days that all that shit about supply and demand is bullshit. There is no market clearance price, the seller simply has a gun to your head and can ask for the entire contents of your wallet. Whether the market ever reaches equilibrium is fucking irrelevant - the fact that it demonstrably does not reach equilibrium instantly and you still have life needs means that the market state at that moment is inherently coercive.

Which means that the Libertarian belief in a market without coercion is simply a fantasy. No such market could exist without government guarantees of basic life needs for all market participants. And even if the government guarantees access to water, that non-coercive market immediately breaks down the very instant that a natural disaster disrupts the government's ability to provide that even temporarily.

Which is of course the actual world we live in. The government provides drinking water through the mains, and when that gets disrupted by earthquakes or hurricanes the market for water temporarily becomes coercive until the government water is restored.

Needs are not "demand" in the economic sense. They are needs. And Libertarianism cannot account for that reality. which is why their economic predictions are so horribly wrong. Well, amongst the reasons.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

@ETortoise: I was on my phone. But I'll explain it for you.

AC0, you’ve made a lot of claims in this thread that people don’t understand “real” libertarianism. I would posit that most people here understand it better than you do; in that they understand it as a political tool used by the very powerful to convince the slightly-more-powerful-than-average to support the status quo. The largest financial backers of libertarian thought in the USA are (or were) the Koch brothers, who would count as plutocrats by any reasonable measure.

And who supports your Democratic, Liberal, and Progressive parties? Are they not also plutocrats? Are we to forbid people with X amount of money or in this-or-that tax bracket from supporting this or that cause?

Private Property, that is the exclusionary use of property or capital to create wealth for the owner...

You say a bunch of statements that I don't have an issue with. Wealth isn't created in a vacuum, land is valuable because resources, geographic position, existing infrastructure, etc. But then you go to make the point that the land's value is tied up in the labor of other people, many of whom were never compensated for their work, let alone fairly. OK, fine, I grant you that. What would you propose the solution to be? A endless loop of reparations and repatriation? Endless squabbling about who was here first, who wronged who, who the biggest victim is? If someone steals my truck, and sells it to you, you are not then the owner of the truck. Of course, I have to prove it was my truck. And if the con-artist can be found, he should suffer the consequences of his actions, including paying a debt to you for the money he swindled to you. But if he can't, my truck should be returned to me, and I'm sorry, but you got con'ed.

Example #1: In England before the rise of capitalism [...] Example #2: Many countries are settler-colonies where a group of people came and dispossessed the previous inhabitants [...] In both cases were have people who’s traditional rights of use over land was taken from them by the State. Why should the property rights of those the State gifted their land to be sacrosanct now?

Because, again, what is the proposed remedy to this past injustice? An endless parade of reprisals and enacted vendettas against those with whom X group has grievances? The extremes this could be taken to are ridiculous: you mention strains of plants and animals bred by countless humans over millennia, are we then to pay the descendants of those Asian peoples who first domesticated the ancestors of today's chickens? How would you verify such claims? How much would you reckon that evolutionary and technological advancement be worth?

Now let’s take a look at “Natural Rights.” [...] as Frank said earlier, all rights are also an infringement on rights. Your right to free speech necessarily infringes on my right to not hear opinions I disagree with, and so on. Going deeper, looking at the right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” [...] you have a right to life that excludes a right to food, water, shelter and healthcare...

"The right not to hear opinions I disagree with," and "right to food, water, shelter, and healthcare," if you think about it for just a few seconds, are about as stupid as, "I have a right to a girl-friend," or "I have a right to a TV, smart-phone, and vehicle." You and Frank, and these others here, misconceive what is meant by rights. The only rights you legitimately have are obtained by others abstaining from forcing/coercing/harming you or your property. That's it. But you would expand the concept of rights to include, NOT abstaining from forcing/coercing/harming persons and property, but actively using force/coercion/harm to acquire property and make other people forfeit said things. Thus my incredulity at being called an agent of plutocrats, corporate overlords, a Fascist and Authoritarian, etc. when my opponents in this forum are the very ones arguing that people should be made indentured servants, slaves, serfs, etc made to provide for people who "have not" these things that, in their utopia, everyone would have. Of course, you guys don't see it that way. You view yourself as "the good guys" even though your ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, result in the erosion of freedom and a decline in the quality of life. Libertarians assume that, given the freedom to do so, such personal needs would be met by groups and individuals mutually consenting (agreeing) to a contract which both parties agree to: a poor hungry man would not have to steal to eat, for he would be free to enter into any contract and agreement with anyone offering bread that he found favorable. But you and your ilk say that isn't good enough, that he must be hired for 10$ minimum, to work no less than 4 and no more than 8 hours a day (and still you would pick his pocket) and to make matters worse, you impose your rules on anyone who would like to enter into a mutually beneficial contract with that poor individual, but your rules, which must be followed otherwise severe repercussions will follow, dis-incentivize most from entering a contract with this individual. It's terribly ironic, in the sense of dramatic irony, that you and your ilk believe that the only way for there to be peace and prosperity is at the end of swords, clubs, and guns, with shackles and chains.

[ArmorClassZero]

"So if we were designing a system of government based on these modern virtues, we might prioritize compassion. Compassion is a good argument for social liberty. Let gay people get married. Let transgender people choose where to poop. It's less of a good argument for economic liberty. Certainly, there are restrictive economic policies that the compassionate would abhor, policies that would do immense harm, that's an infinite field. I can always find an infinite number of policies that would do immense harm, in any situation. But a hands off policy is still a policy, and is one that will allow harm to happen. If we set policy out of compassion, then our goal is to minimize and distribute injury, so that harm is mitigated and spread out."

Coincidentally, Libertarians are all for social freedoms of gays, trans, minorities, etc. What people do in their personal lives, with their own body, as mutually consenting agreeing individuals or groups, is perfectly fine. That's the way things should be.

But notice how, in your world-view, your utopia, you would mandate compassion and charity, thereby destroying both and undermining your own ideal, as the only way to secure something by law is the use of force, violence, coercion. You would compel people to love with guns. And rather than just allowing harm to happen, which is nature and circumstance taking its course and in which no one is culpable, you would, in your own words: distribute injury. You would seek to minimize and mitigate harm by taking the responsibility into your hands of harming everyone else. Thank you for admitting it.